GLM-5.2

Best for

Teams that want an MIT-licensed, self-hostable model with good design taste and instant responses

Price & access

$1.40 in / $4.40 out per 1M with $0.26 cached input (Z.ai); Alibaba resale $1.40/$4.40 in Singapore and $1.10/$3.851 in China, Germany, US and Hong Kong; `glm-5.2-us` $1.40/$4.4

Evidence summary

Z.ai pricing page, Alibaba regional price rows, two preference boards, a third-party SWE-bench Pro placement and two vendor comparison tables. Licence (MIT) rests on Artificial Analysis rather than the model card.

Edition status

No prior snapshot. Tracked in the September 2026 baseline.

Strengths

• Design Arena Website rank 8 (1315) - best open-weight design-preference score on that board
• MIT licence with open weights and a 1M context
• TTFT 1.60 s at 71.1 tok/s makes it feel immediate
• SWE-bench Pro 62.1% at $1.40/$4.40 (or $1.10/$3.851 in several regions)

Tradeoffs

• GLM-5.3 costs the same and is much stronger (DeepSWE 46.2 -> 66.9)
• DeepSWE 46.2 and Terminal Bench 3.0 4.6 show weak long-horizon agentic coding
• Text-only on the evidence available
• AA non-reasoning row collapses to 26